“My girl’s come a-calling,” Dottie said, and we hugged and patted each other. She held me away for study.

Her eyes reddened, so I said, “Your cats are escaping.”

“Otto and Spotto,” she said. She had given my behind a pretty good pinch.

She pulled me into the lobby area, where a lacquered fish arced over the mantel and most of the furniture was shrouded with drop cloths or sheets.

My mom had kept the same look since the forties— mules, sweater sets, long hair rolled back off her forehead.

“She’s pinup stuff,” Raf had said and sighed after their first meeting.

Spotto scooted across a braided rug into the big kitchen area with Dottie and me casually following.

Making coffee, Dottie used complicated German equipment—bean grinders, valves, tubes, and spigots. “Where is he?” she asked, meaning Raf.

“Seventh or eighth circle of hell,” I said.

“Poor guy,” said Dottie. She was uncritically crazy about him.

Winter-storm thunder rolled around outside. The cats followed its noise from room to room, window to window.

“Something’s boiling out there,” she said.

I said, “That goddamn storm has been on my back all the way from Houston. It hates me!”

Dottie tasted her coffee and smiled. “You must have some of this.”

“I’m already shaking without it, Mom.”

“Then here’s what we should do. Go for a ride, smoke some reefer, and I’ll tell you some giant news.”

Besides being caretaker for the Seahorse, Dottie wrote a column for the Cape Head weekly, The Pulse. Hers was a consumer-activist column that’d been picked up by a few other coastal-area papers. “Conscience Shopping,” it was called.

Now as we drove away from the inn and into the strange afternoon, she said, “What I’ve finally learned and have been doing lately is taking a truth, like that some appliance makers have nuclear weapons contracts, air-and-space-weapons contracts. Or parent companies in South Africa, yet! Or most recently I’ve been writing about toiletries—mouthwash, shampoo, and what-all—emphasizing the importance of who’s getting the money and for what. All in a thousand words, until I can think, ‘There, I’ve done my damage.’ ”

Shopping with her would be hell.

I said, “In fact, he may be on his way here.”

“Who?”

“Raf. I’m sorry. I got a letter. . . . He’ll probably never show, but he might come, soon. Monday, maybe. It’s hard for me to think about too much else.”

“And me yapping and yapping,” Dottie said.

Above the bluffs at land’s end was the dying village of Cape Head, balanced on hilly high ground over cliffs that were getting washed away, that fell to the rocky beach. Every time I had looked the cliffs were steeper, closer to the village. One lofty old hotel was already going over in a spill of stones and timber and pieces of plaster walls.